ManageWP’s Top 100 Free WordPress Plugins of the Year

At the end of the day, WordPress lives and breathes by the huge variety of free plugins that are available for download from WordPress.org.

Don’t get me wrong — I love premium plugins. But when it comes to starting off with WordPress, it is the free plugins that give you a taste of what is possible.

With the above said, it is no surprise that the Internet is flooded with “top x plugins” posts. Whilst such posts can be extremely useful, you often end up seeing the same plugins pop up from post to post. Back in February 2012, we decided to buck the trend by introducing a post series that highlights lesser-known plugins — “up and comers”.

Our Plugins of the Month series has proven to be extremely popular, and as such it seemed like a no-brainer to cap off 2012 with an inaugural Plugins of the Year feature.

2012’s Plugins of the Year

As with our recent Themes of the Year post, the inclusion criteria is pretty simple. Each plugin must:

Have less than 100,000 downloads (at the time of its original selection)

Be highly rated

Each of the plugins you see below has been handpicked from a carefully filtered list. Each and every one is a quality offering, and you’ve probably never heard of the majority.

They’re ranked by a combination of the number of downloads and average ratings. You can also click on the column headers to sort them by the number of downloads or the average rating (individually). Enjoy!

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My Top 10 Plugins of the Year

Throughout the course of 2012 I have checked out a huge number of plugins. The 100 you see above is just the tip of the iceberg — that was taken from a shortlist of 121, which in turn was taken from another shortlist of well over 1,000.

As I cast my eye over the plugins listed above many stand out to me. I feel that a select few deserve special recognition, which is why you will find below my personal top 10 plugins of 2012.

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To each developer of the above plugins I offer my sincere thanks for creating something that makes using WordPress even more enjoyable and rewarding.

Pay it Back

Free plugin developers give us so much in terms of additional functionality for our WordPress sites and get so little in return. If a particular plugin above has caught your eye, why not take a moment to leave a positive review on WordPress.org? It will only take you a minute but will help the plugin developer receive more attention for his or her hard work.

Finally, I’d love to know if you feel that a particularly great plugin has been missed off the list — please share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Tom Ewer

Tom Ewer is the founder of WordCandy.co. He has been a huge fan of WordPress since he first laid eyes on it, and has been writing educational and informative content for WordPress users since 2011. When he's not working, you're likely to find him outdoors somewhere – as far away from a screen as possible!

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30Comments

Vishal Kumar

DCGee

I read your website with excitement because I’m expected to develop a website and have procrastinated for much too long. When I got to the end of the article the Top Ten was not visible. There is a “table id=2 /]”. I hope you will fix this since I sincerely believe I can do this now with your step by step approach. Thank you. Here I go…

Tom Merrill

Great concept, unfortunately out of date. Which makes it pretty much meaningless. I came across several TOP plug-ins that WP flagged as problematic because they had not been updated in OVER TWO YEARS. No telling how close any of the remaining plug-ins are approaching that juncture. And how many other, great plug-ins are not on this list because they were created in the four years since this article was published.

As a newbie to website creation, I would also have appreciated some kind of categorical identification of the plug-9ns. i.e.: how/where the plug-in is used: blog, appearance, security, etc.

Miguel

MattWest

Wow, such a useful list. another plugin that i find useful is the sendola contact details button. visitors click the button and get your contact details sent to their phone via sms. could be useful for some kinds of business. check it out. http://www.sendola.com/

Umre

I see that in this 100 wordpress plugins there are no plugins that refer to any video chat, and this is disappointing for me. These days a proper communication and entertainment are essential to a community. Why don’t you try to bring more people on your site with a video chat plugin for WordPress from AVChat Software. Of course , even if the chat is awesome , it can’t do miracles if it’s not used at it’s proper value. Try making shows every once a week, put some interesting videos in the chat, engage your users to use more and more the chat and after a while they will come to your website just for this interactivity and experience that only your site can offer. And they will bring other friends too. So why not try and enhance their experience with the new WordPress video chat from AVChat.

Alexander

Awesome list Tom! I just figured I’d add that I love Disqus and use it on client sites all the time. The integration of social services and advanced syndication features can really supercharge your comments. I’d also like to mention Relevanssi for anyone who needs a quick way to improve their WordPress search results. Once you set up the index, it returns almost perfect search results.

Che Elvis

Thanks for the great list. I wish to get the best free plugins that can facilitate creation of a job search site, where CV’s can be uploaded, and its easy to place salary range, deadlines etc. Also a good plug in for a forum in a site

Damian @ CJToolbox

Paula

Hi Tom,

These are some really amazing plugins. I’ve
been thinking about starting a blog and now
I’m really convinced that I should. Now the
next thing is to figure out how many and
which one should I use. Thanks again.

Shea Bunge

I have never had any trouble with WordPress breaking after an upgrade due to plugins. If you only choose plugins that you actually need, and those plugins are well-coded and backed by a dedicated developer, then you should be fine.